This is the best piece of investigative journalism in the field of sports I have ever seen in my life. Fantastic piece, just incredible all the way. When it started to leak in the past week that Yahoo Sports "10" story would be about Miami, I immediately thought there was no way it could be a "10" without it being a current national power. I was wrong, this is a soft 10 at the very least.

My favorite part though...

In individual situations, he would set up a player with a hotel room and have a woman sent to their location. In group settings, Shapiro said he would use the Mercury Hotel in South Beach, where he would purchase multiple rooms where array of women would be made available to a large group of players. The rooms were typically registered under the alias “Teddy Dupay” – a reference to the former University of Florida point guard whose 5-foot-9 stature and features were similar to the 5-foot-5 Shapiro.

Teddy Dupay. Kudos to you, sir.

"Dammit you piss me off. I f#ckin hate you and I hope you f#cking get killed by a rabid polar bear you douche bag."

I was certain that the ten would be Alabama or some other relevant team, as I thought that was the only way it could be a 10; I was wrong. Like Bayou said, this is a ten. What makes this different than the Dohrman hatchet job is that it is all new news, attempts to tell the whole story with editorializing and it is backed up by records and sources with real names.

Granted there is a little more anonymity than I had hoped, but it is strong.

Anyone else remember when Willis McGahee said that if he wanted his 2002 NC ring during the Buckeye drama? Something about people in glass houses is coming to mind here.

Coming from a Wolverine, we're the football equivalent of a formerly abused wife of a meth addict who just remarried the safe nice guy. We're just glad we have someone who's aware that it's a rivalry and that tackling on defense is integral. Baby steps.

Pat Forde was on ESPN a little while ago saying that the '4 year window' rule will be out of play due to the fact that it was 8 years of repeated violations that date back into when the window was still open.

They also updated the article with individual player links on the right. You can click on each player and get detailed info on allegations pertaining to them. Robinson and his crew did a ton of work to put this together. He is a skinny, ginger, angel of death right now.

"Dammit you piss me off. I f#ckin hate you and I hope you f#cking get killed by a rabid polar bear you douche bag."

Don't worry Bayou, I think he is smart enough to stay out of SEC country. He has to realize that he has a "purty mouth."

I seriously worry about the guys like Clay Travis that are looking into Alabama and Auburn football.

Coming from a Wolverine, we're the football equivalent of a formerly abused wife of a meth addict who just remarried the safe nice guy. We're just glad we have someone who's aware that it's a rivalry and that tackling on defense is integral. Baby steps.

Wow. If the NCAA can corroborate this...I don't know that they'd ever do the Death Penalty again, but this shit is really going to put that theory to the test. It's an amazing piece, with enough of a paper trail to really make it plausible. I'm always skeptical when you've got one guy (particularly a snake-oil salesman like Shapiro) and a bunch of anonymous sources, but there's a lot of documentation to back up what this guy says. And if the NCAA can find these anonymous sources, and they tell the same story...well let's just say "The U" won't be relevant for quite some time.

He also put bounties on specific players, including Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and a three-year standing bounty on Seminoles quarterback Chris Rix from 2002 to 2004, offering $5,000 to any player who knocked him out of a game.

“We pounded the (expletive) out of that kid,” Shapiro said of Rix. “Watch the tape of those games. You’ll see so many big hits on him. Guys were all going after that $5,000 in cash. [Jon] Vilma tried to kill him – just crushed him – a couple of times trying to get that $5,000.And he almost got it, too.”

He also put bounties on specific players, including Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and a three-year standing bounty on Seminoles quarterback Chris Rix from 2002 to 2004, offering $5,000 to any player who knocked him out of a game.

“We pounded the (expletive) out of that kid,” Shapiro said of Rix. “Watch the tape of those games. You’ll see so many big hits on him. Guys were all going after that $5,000 in cash. [Jon] Vilma tried to kill him – just crushed him – a couple of times trying to get that $5,000.And he almost got it, too.”

Cerebral_DownTime wrote:How deep in mud do you have to be when a stripper calls and asks you to pay for an abortion?

"...because the idiot (player) might have wanted to keep it..."

So much goodness in that article.

I love the fact Shaprio was the one to make the call for the alleged father. Because he knows best.

I'm not convinced he didn't know best on that actually.

You wonder why, with all the finest players money and broads could buy, the school was largely irrelevant on the field. Then you consider those kids were probably strung out, hung over and had syphilis and their coaches spent the better part of their time at Cheetah's and it becomes clearer.

CAVSTRIBEBROWNSin07! wrote:What is this "10" that everyone is referring to?

Wetzel and Robinson had hinted in recent months that they were working on two more investigations after OSU...one of which they described as a 10 on a scale of 10 (they called OSU an 8) and which they said they would publish in August.

Now OSU seems more like a 4, seems to me.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

The sad thing is there are millions of ESPeons out there that will think this was all ESPN. They did it, they uncovered it, they're the world wide leader in sports. Pat Forde, man, he got in there and started diggin'. Look what he came with.

He's the worst "writer" in the sports media. At this point ESPN is nothing more than a piggy back second hand sports news enterprise. 90% of their NFL "insider" info is shit Jay Glazer breaks for fuck's sake.

He also put bounties on specific players, including Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and a three-year standing bounty on Seminoles quarterback Chris Rix from 2002 to 2004, offering $5,000 to any player who knocked him out of a game.

“We pounded the (expletive) out of that kid,” Shapiro said of Rix. “Watch the tape of those games. You’ll see so many big hits on him. Guys were all going after that $5,000 in cash. [Jon] Vilma tried to kill him – just crushed him – a couple of times trying to get that $5,000.And he almost got it, too.”

e0y2e3 wrote:I mean, catching a head coach lying about NCAA violations probably is around an 8.

The only problem is that this is more so a 25.

Thats the whole point of a scale. If this is a ten then OSU was about a 5, or a 6. And I thought the 8 was still to come, not that OSU was the 8. Either way, one of the key takeaways is that this same fucking team was on the OSU trail.

The difference, (between ESPN, SI, and Yahoo!), is what each decided to do when the fucking information trail dead-ended.

Fuck ESPN. And Dohrmann. They both must so epically inadequate right now.

YahooFanChicago wrote:Unlike most of you up in here I don't have any experience with hookers.

Don't make us get Charles Robinson on the case

And yeah, obvious rack to everyones' compliments regarding Robinson. They guy is a credit to his industry, and tight-lipped to boot. These pieces he has been putting out recently took months (almost a year in this case) to develop and he has yet to be scooped by ESPN or anyone. He even still had people guessing incorrectly on what school this article would target up until last week.

"Dammit you piss me off. I f#ckin hate you and I hope you f#cking get killed by a rabid polar bear you douche bag."

J Coz, the OSU thing cost the cleanest coach (going in) in college sports his job.

The sweatervest went from president of OSU for life to showing up at Browns camp and hopking Holmgren will spend some time talking w/ him.

It also caused a leading Heisman contender and one of the most hyped college athletes of the past however long to leave school.

Keep some perspective on that shit.

My only point w/ the 10 versus 25 (and I know you aren't this stupid) is that if an event is an outlier it's the Miami thing. What happened at OSU was no joke especially when you consider the people involved. ESPN wouldn't have went fishing for blood if the story was a five.

Big difference in the Yahoo coverage was that in OSU's case, the Yahoo source was inside the NCAA (presumably). They "broke" the story long after OSU had uncovered the Tressel emails and self-reported the whole thing to the NCAA, and the investigation was well underway.

These Miami allegations are a year old too, but the Yahoo coup is that they got direct access to Shapiro for 100 hours of interviews over months. It is amazing...and to their great credit...that nothing leaked in advance. This thing is textbook investigative journalism.

The other obvious, major difference is that Shapiro was an official "booster", and Rife/Talbot were not. The photo of the university President Shalala holding Shapiro's 50K check and posing with him is priceless. The dude actually led the team out of the tunnel onto the field a couple times in return for his cash to the school.

His picture should forever be in the dictionary under "jock-sniffer".

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

Instead of trying to find ways of solving the problem that is going on in the NCAA in regards to issues facing student athletes, we see more people calling for sanctions, bowl-bans and scholarship reductions. You get a complete and utter moron like Mark May foaming at the mouth calling for a university to be punished, while he offers no solution to the problem himself.

How about instead of some guy in search of his own self-interests like Mark Emmert heading things up, the NCAA actually forms a committee full of people actually involved with the sport, and athletes themselves. Every school gets three representatives, one coach, one player and one person involved in the AD in some capacity for said sport. You sit them down, determine the problems facing the student athletes themselves, and the university.

Swerb wrote:Go start a blog if you want to tell the world your incomprehendible ramblings.

Cerebral_DownTime wrote:I have a big arm and can throw the ball pretty damn far...... maybe even over those moutains. The Browns should sign me, i'll let you all in locker room to drink beer. Then we can all go out the parking lot to watch me do motorcycle stunts.

The sweatervest went from president of OSU for life to showing up at Browns camp and hopking Holmgren will spend some time talking w/ him.

It also caused a leading Heisman contender and one of the most hyped college athletes of the past however long to leave school.

Keep some perspective on that shit.

My only point w/ the 10 versus 25 (and I know you aren't this stupid) is that if an event is an outlier it's the Miami thing. What happened at OSU was no joke especially when you consider the people involved. ESPN wouldn't have went fishing for blood if the story was a five.

The preist of college football got caught diddling boys.

Please. Robinson himself is being quoted saying that the media should have learned their lesson from OSU, because speculating doesn't pay and the things at OSU didn't go nearly as deep as anyone was - dare I say - hoping for.

Top of a scale is there for a reason. The outliers are the reason you dont go overboard when trying to sum up a situation.

I email Futiak when he called OSU "an uncontrollable monster"....well what the fuck do you call Miami if you've already used that moniker for OSU?

A super-duper Uncontrollable Robot Monster?

Insert some historical perspective on OSU yourself....just because there was an element of surprise to OSU's case, does not change the severity of the actual violations.

Historically, OSU's issues would be a 5 or 6. And Tressel writing that book and wearing a sweatervest and then *gasp* lying to the NCAA, doesn't change that, or even influence it. Historically. Let me put it in perspective - OSU doesn't make the top 3 in this calendar year.

But that's an 8 on the historical scale? What is NC then? They were most assuredly higher on the scale. An 8.5? a 9? What then would Boise St and USC be? a 9.5? Where do we fit in Miami, SMU, Means, Switzer, Sherril, The Fab Five? Thats only probably half of the more famous and clearly more egregious NCAA violators

Last edited by JCoz on Wed Aug 17, 2011 5:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The sweatervest went from president of OSU for life to showing up at Browns camp and hopking Holmgren will spend some time talking w/ him.

It also caused a leading Heisman contender and one of the most hyped college athletes of the past however long to leave school.

Keep some perspective on that shit.

My only point w/ the 10 versus 25 (and I know you aren't this stupid) is that if an event is an outlier it's the Miami thing. What happened at OSU was no joke especially when you consider the people involved. ESPN wouldn't have went fishing for blood if the story was a five.

The preist of college football got caught diddling boys.

Please. Robinson himself is being quoted saying that the media should have learned their lesson from OSU, because speculating doesn't pay and the things at OSU didn't go nearly as deep as anyone was - dare I say - hoping for.

Top of a scale is there for a reason. The outliers are the reason you dont go overboard when trying to sum up a situation.

I email Futiak when he called OSU "an uncontrollable monster"....well what the fuck do you call Miami if you've already used that moniker for OSU?

A super-duper Uncontrollable Robot Monster?

And why dont you insert some historical perspective on OSU yourself. Just because there was an element of surprise to OSU's case, does not change the severity of the actual violations.

Historically, OSU's issues would be a 5 or 6. And Tressel writing that book and wearing a sweatervest and then *gasp* lying to the NCAA, doesn't change that, or even influence it. Historically. Let me put it in perspective - OSU doesn't make the top 3 in this calendar year.

But that's an 8 on the historical scale? What is NC then? They were most assuredly higher on the scale. An 8.5? a 9? What then would Boise St and USC be? a 9.5? Where do we fit in Miami, SMU, Means, Switzer, Sherril, The Fab Five? Thats only probably half of the more famous and clearly more egregious NCAA violators

Maybe it's like the Richter scale where every tenth of a point on the scale is actually ten times worse than the point before it.

You brain surgeons ever think that's how the press measured these things? Hmm?